Enter now to win a copy of the book According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate Elder, Doc Holliday’s Love and a Kindle Paperwhite.
Kate Elder was a working girl. Throughout most of her young life, she was employed as a soiled dove — a woman of ill fame, a sporting gal, a prostitute. She wasn’t alone in that profession; hundreds of women entered the trade in the 1800s. Some felt they had no other option but to become a lady of the evening, and others joined the fallen industry believing they could make a fortune capitalizing on the vices of intrepid cowboys and pioneers.
It was Kate’s relationship with John Henry (Doc) Holliday that brought her notoriety and lifted her out of the role as mere courtesan to that of common law wife to the well-known gambler, gunfighter, and dentist.
Kate’s story of her life on the frontier as a soiled dove and her time with one of the West’s most recognizable characters has value. She was in her eighties when she dared to recall all that had transpired since leaving Hungary where she was born to the events leading up to the historic gunfight at the OK Corral. There are those who insist that because of her age her recollections are faulty and that little of anything she said occurred the way she reported it. I maintain it would be wrong not to share all the eighty-four-year-old Kate had to tell about an adventurous time in history merely because she was an octogenarian. Some of us at fifty-seven can’t remember what day it is even though we’ve checked the calendar upwards of twenty times since starting work. Yet, I can vividly recall that during seventh grade, music class Pam Green loudly pointed out that I was growing a mustache. (It’s important to note here that I’m a woman, so this was extremely detrimental to my self-esteem at the time.)
According to Kate is a biography about the life and times of Kate Elder. She would have written the book herself if a publisher would have been willing to pay her handsomely for her tale. Kate believed her story was worth a great deal. No one besides Kate saw it that way. Throughout the book I’ve used all the information contained in Kate’s journals, personal letters, and interviews to tell of her life from her childhood in Hungary to her waning years at a retirement home for the elderly in Arizona. Where some of her details were ambiguous, I used newspapers and historical documents to corroborate her story.
